FROM IF YOU ARE THE ONE TO TAP AND TOUCH CINEMA: ON FEMINIST MOVEMENT AND FEMINIST ART IN EAST AND WEST

BY JUAN XU

The remark "I'd rather weep in a BMW than smile on a bicycle" made a hit after it appeared in the TV program If You Are the One. It is said to be a motto for Chinese girls when they look for their Mr. Right. Lan Jiny, a Chinese-German femfeministale artist, once gave a penetrating summary of the relationship between men and women in China: Chinese women love money while Chinese men love charming women. She got only part of the picture, for actually they both love money, and for Chinese men, money takes precedence if they have only one choice. Chinese men love charming females because it is not as expensive and they can get easier access. It is not that Chinese women discard male charm and love money absolutely, but they admit that money is more attractive than male charm, because money can ensure them a comfortable and enviable life, in other words, money is a social security card for a decent life. Chinese women's love of money is not only a cultural heredity but also a proof that being determines consciousness. It is also a forceful statement that women, as a disadvantaged social group, are still unable to hold up half the sky. Women's love of money finds its equivalent in the Chinese saying, "Marrying a man means finding clothes and food". It was the same in Europe in the 19th century, when marriage was vital for middle class women in England to improve their social status. Virginia Woolf, forerunner of Women's Liberation Movement, once took herself as an example saying that thanks to her inheritance, she could concentratconcentrate ed on her literary career, unlike her peers who had to make a living by finding a husband. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, she came up with the slogan to encourage women to struggle for "a room of one's own" , i.e., to have their own rights and freedom to enjoy their own private space. Her revolutionary proposal marked the beginning of modern women's rebellion. Economic independence is the prerequisite for mental independence. Women's movement in Europe went hand in hand with the achievement of industrial revolution in the past one hundred years. Without the jobs Industrial Revolution provided, women would not have gained equality and liberation in a real sense. As Lu Xun pointed out, "Nora could not survive after she left home, so she had to go home herself". Inequality between men and women has a long history both in the East and the West. "Innocence is the virtue for women", "The husband has absolute dominance over the wife", and "Only women and villains are difficult to raise" and the like have persisted for two thousand years as commonly accepted rules, even for women themselves. A women in ancient China"would doll herself up for him who loves her" in an attempt to improve her social status in the patriarchal society. So did women in the west. In ancient Greece, men dominated the society and they set standards for everything, whereas women stood for imperfection and insufficiency. The belief of "weaker body, weaker mind" deprived women of strong will and moral strength. Without higher education, women did not participate in public life, so it was hard for Greek men to find a wife who could share his mind, which gave rise to "boy love" (Knabeliebe) in the upper class, i.e., an adult man had custody of a male adolescent and is responsible for his education and cultivation. Such feeling between men was regarded perfect love in Sparta. Moreover, this feeling refined the sexual relationship by elevating the common sexuality to the sublime Eeros(?), a way of spiritualization. Male adolescents were considered a perfect combination of the body and the mind because of their skin as fine as women's and their creativity and discretion particular to men. Over two thousand years, women have been put in extreme positions, either as the Holy Mother or a whore, without personality as equal and independent human beings. It is true both in the East and the West. In the West, until the 1960s men had been the synonym for courage, adventurous spirit, creator of material and spiritual wealth, in a word, the center, with women the margin. However, the dominant Androcentrismhas undergone a thorough change since the 1960s, along with the eventful international politics like the third world's struggle for independence, the Civil Right Movement and Women's Liberation Movement. The '68 Students' Movement that swept the West, in particular, paved the way for the advancement of women. Feminist movement started in France and soon spread to America and Western Europe, becoming a social movement involving all classes. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex enlightened this movement, the mass production of contraceptive drugs provided the sexual liberation movement solid material basis. Brigitte Bardo, a female movie star, also an avant-garde feminist in France, began to expose women to sexual eenlightment, calling on them to give more attention to their own experience in sex and life. The bikini, the mini-skirt and rock and roll became the hallmarks of feminist aesthetics revolution. Feminism was soon spread to Germany and assumed unique German quality of thoroughness and efficiency. It was Alice Schwarzer who introduced Feminism into Germany from France. At the age of 22, she went to France and worked as a housekeeper there. Coming back from Paris, she volunteeredvolunteered at the Düsseldorfer News and became a reporter at the satirical magazine Pardon. In 1970, she returned to Paris as a freelance correspondent and began to drive the feminist movement in France. After she went back, she lauchedlaunched a series of violent attack on the male dominated society. She not only spread feminist movement in Germany but also made it more Germanic. In 1971, 374 women, including Senta Berge and Romy Schneider, with her encouragement, made an joint declaration "I have had an abortion" in Stern. Her debated on TV with an anti-feminist doctor and writer brought her sudden fame. She launched a feminist magazine called EMMA, serving as chief editor. Over the last 20 years, she has been sueing Stern over anti-feminist photos and led the PornNo campaign. In 2005 the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphaliaawarded her the Staatspreisfor her contribution to women's equality. She had published over 30 books, among others those on Simone de Beauvoir, Romy Schneider and woman philosopher Marion Gräfin Dönhoff. With her new book strongly criticizing Islamic Androcentrism, she even became a target for terrorist threat. Her 20 years' effort in feminist movement has not only won her a lot of followers but also brought her violent attack and insulting remarks, even some dissatisfaction and hostility from some feminists. A woman minister recently criticized her for being dogmatic and out-dated for the new feminist concepts. She proposeproposes a new model for women, i.e., a combination of a caring mother, an attractive wife and a successful career women. In other words, she advocated a new type of feminism, the core of which is "I have both what men have and what they don't have". Alice Schwarzer criticized this new type of feminist ideal as naive and utopic, considering it an excuse for comprise with the male-dominated society. In the anti-cultural movement in the 1960s, "FfeministaleAart" was the highlight of contemporary art. It challenged conventions and took the lead of feminist movement. The so-called "female art" was concerned not only with the artists' gender, the features of the living things in women's art, but more importantly, its political and spiritual role in the construction of society and culture. According to female artists, the present art system, and even the art history, deprives women of their right to interpret history and beauty, and the patriarchal system of our society grap the discourse power in art and silences women. Female art, therefore, is to change this situation. They reject the typical approaches of male artists, reflect their experience of being externalized by the patriarcalpatriarchal society by means of their unique art language and try to view women's social value from different socio-cultural perspectives. "Regards d'hommes" (man's looks) becomes an important concept for female art to reveal the institutionalized sexism, in other words, to reveal how women veiew themselves by referring to men's aesthetic standard, consciously or unconsciously, as mainstream values, in order to set up their own code of conducts and aesthetics. As daring vanguards of western female art in the 1960s, American female artists Cindy Sherman and Judy Chicago turned to photography to review the self in the culture of various roles and studies women's cultural power in graphic language, therefore creating a new art language of the female body. By contrast to American female artists, their European counterparts, with the exception of several British ones, seemed to be out of date and conventional. It was Valie Export, an Austrian avant-garde female artist, who distinguished herself as a controversial legendary figure in European female art, with her startling and exaggerated art practice in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, breaking the dead silence in the Austrian scene that was owerwhelmedoverwhelmed in the atmosphere of aristocratic saloon of the 19th century. Born in Linz, a scenic small city in Austria,Valie Export was educated in a convent, where she was exposed to rigid hierarchy. From 1955 to 1958, she studied at the Arts and Crafts College in LinziLinz. In 1967, she changed her name to VALIE EXPORT (written in uppercase letters, like an artistic logo, shedding her father’s and husband’s names and appropriating her new surname from a popular brand of cigarettes), believing that everything in the capitalist society was a product and a human being was no exception, so she herself can be exported. "Export", to a feminist emale artist, also means stepping out of the safe world of petty philistines into a kaleidoscopic world. In addition, she stressed that it was necessary to write her name in uppercase letters, which was particularly important for the rebellion against the conventional Austria in the 1960s. Uppercase letters highlight the strong self-consciousness that used be neglected. Over thousands of years in the patriarchal Europe, woman's name changed as their husbands changed, so they did not have a name of their own. It remained so until over a decade ago. In marriage, a woman is free to choose to keep her own surname or follow that of her husband. Sociologically speaking, a changeable name itself suggests that women have never got a defined social identity and cultural identity, and without any independent will, they depend on men as children do on adults. EXPORT was well-defined as her name, i.e. to set up female criticism as a product in reaction against women's oppression in the capitalist society. Her most sensational feminist work is Tapp-und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema). The film differed from a cinema in the common sense because it was not shown in a movie theatre but in the street in Vienna. In this avowedly revolutionary body performance in 1969, VAlIE Valie EXPORTxport wore a tiny "movie theatertheatre" of carton around her naked upper body, with the two windows of the cartons fixed with miniature curtains. Anyone was invited to came and touch her breasts for 30 seconds. This seemingly unconventional, absurd and self-abusive body performance was by no means a shot in the dark. Instead, it is a violent attack on the sexual inequality in the post-war era, particularly women's passive status in the gender relation between men and women. Men took this rare opportunity to take part in "a full life" in the cinema. The curious look in the men's eyes disappeared the moment they put their hands in the boxes. There were various looks in the strange interaction — man's longing and women's ambiguity, which vividly captured the moment their looks met suddenly. This game, like a strip tease show, follows the rule both men and women knew well, therefore suggesting shyness and provocation. The women provoked with her body, while men did nothing more than held out their hands. The female smile, sensibility and fragility were mixed with helplessness. The male visitors, on the other hand, were not only eager but also sentimental, as the male's dominance of the other sex was a form of social coercion in some way. In 1990, EXPORT made her declaration of multimedia game to show her doubts about the "truth" news media claims. She clearly exposed the violence in the institutionalized structure by defamiliarizing and isolating the objects people are familiar with and changing the context. Such an accurate and appropriate plan made Tap and Touch Cinema a classic in fighting against the externalization of women. Here, the object became the subject, therefore changing the designated social roles. Moreover, she took inspiration from the traditional open cinema and played an interactive game with the audience in contemporary art. It was a game based on the renegotiated accord with society and culture and the intervention of multimedia. By confronting the strong wall of the petty philistines with her body, she attacked violently the dull and out-dated vision of art. What is revolutionary about the performance is that it was not given in a private place (it is always the case actually) but in a public space, the street, to be exact, so it was a work of art. Tap and Touch Cinema can be viewed as an extended cinema and concrete application of Beuys' concept about art. This work, her representative, distinguished her as one of the founders of multimedia art.Tap and Touch Cinemamade her well-known, while another startling work crowned her as the model of female body performance artist and master of female art in the world. In 1969 she did her icon work Aktionshose (Action pants). VALIEalie EXPORTxport,unkempt and with her exposed genitalia at the audience's face level, brandished a machine gun like a guerilla, challenging the aggressive audience. The scene amounted to a nightmare to the conventional Europe that was ignorant of '68 Movement. The otherwise beautiful female appearance was defamiliarized, and the conventional aesthetics was completely altered. Not meaning to be a vanguard, EXPORT just availed herself of art as the language to express her rebellion against the Nazi paternal dictatorship and her longing for female self-determination, and in this case, it is also a carrier of her painful experience and her challenge to the conventional thinking. Her later works, varying greatly in both form and content, were not limited to feminism. Compared with her works in the late '60s and the early '70s, those in the late '80s were not as fierce and radical but kept implicitly defying social conventions and showing concern for women. In her photograph series about the human body in the 1980s, Body Configuration Series, she either puts herself in a corner of a large public space, lay on the stairs, or crawled in front of the court building, expressing her perplexity about women's permanent adaptation to the patriarchal society and impossibility of autonomy. These photos, while showing the constraint imposed on women only, reflected on human being's mental state in which both men and women were time's prisoners, and prisoners to themselves. After the initial success in female art, she went a step further to reflect on human being's common life experience. To her, art is always a serious game, a carrier of the repressed pain that defy the established thinking. Her vanguard performance shocked the society and the art world, which subjected her to various abuses and pressure. She was finally recognized in the art world and society. She first got international recognition before finally getting accepted by the Austrian art world. As a brand, VALIE EXPORT was presented at the 6th Kassel Document in 1977 and with Maria Lassnig, she participated in the Venice Biennale on behalf of Austria in 1980. In 1985, she was nominated at the Berlin International Film Festival for her role as a scenarist and director. From 1989 to 1992 she taught in Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin as a professor, at University of the Arts, Berlin, from 1989 to 1992, and at Cologne Multimedia College from 1995/96 to 2005. In 2007, she attended Venice Biennale and the 12th Kassel Document. She brought shocks to Austria but opened a new chapter in the history of art in Austria. To mark this maverick artist's 70th birthday, Vienna Museum and Linz Museum held respectively a retrospect exhibition from Oct. 16, 2010 to Jan. 30, 2011.

Forty years later today, women have achieved a lot of goals, and their questioning of the female identity and the definition of sex problem have become historya story in the 21st century. With the radical part of feminism mitigated, Women's movement is entering a new stage called "the third wave". In Germany, feminists are reflecting and returning to the base. Female artists do not have to be as radical as they used to in the 1960s in order to fight against the conventions, as women have made great achievements in every fields. In politics, about half of the Cabinet members are female, and Merkel has realized women's dream to be head of the government. A female prime minister's triumph over her counterparts of the other sex in such a male dominated country as Germany is really a political miracle. While Chinese females are rushing to marry someone with a BMW, their German counterparts are becoming more relaxed and more confident thanks to their success, rejecting the much too rigid dogma of binary sexual opposition and shifting from "miserable feminism" to "jovial feminism".